My printer is not printing the colour yellow even though the cartidge is full and new

It appears that one can purchase the black cartridge separately from the colour cartridges. But your Brother machine is designed to stop ALL printing operations when any of the ink cartridges are empty. In that case you would need to replace all ink cartridges that are empty in order to resume printing.

brother printer ink problem? or brother printer problem?

I think that the Canon printers require the colour cartridge to be full so as to print B&W. In Some makes like epson it is possible to continue printing in B&W even if the colour ink is down.
Open properties of the printer and check to see the tools provided, if there is any link to cut off the colour inks .
Just my tip

Hi,

It could be you just have a bad cartridge, If it's new, take it back and get a new one to make sure it's not the cartridge. If you get the new one and it still doesn't print black, then you have a bad print head. Meaning it would need to go to a service dealer to replace or repair the print head.

Thanks Mark

It may be a busted cartridge. Try again using this time a genuine cartridge.
Turning the printer off, even for long periods (days, not weeks), shouldn't have any effect if the ink is of good quality.

Hi matt651, I had the same problem with the DCP-350. As soon as one of the colour cartidges was empty, which happened frequently due to the high ink loss during the cleaning process, the machine stopped working, even when I only wanted to print using black. This is how i worked around the problem using a piece of grey card stock: The tanks have a small clear window that lets you see the ink in the cartridge. This window also triggers a photocell which sits in a little black fork at the back of each of the printer's ink cartridge slots. When the ink levels are up, the cell is blocked, thereby indicating a full cartridge. When the ink level in the cartridge drops below the photocell, the cell switches over, indicating an empty cartridge. So in order to simulate a full ink catridge I removed the offending empty one and instead slipped a piece of cardboard into its slot, thereby fooling the photocell. And hey presto, when I switched the printer back on, all ink cartridges thus manipulated were shown as being "full" and I could continue printing.
Kind regards, Rog

This printer does not let you print if even one of the cartidges is out of ink. I suggest you replace them and then in the printer properties change your settings to the way you want color to be spent.

If is an original brand? Some generic cartridges or refill ones gave that problem.

This came from brothers website:

The Yellow ink cartridge yield is up to 300 pages @ 600 x 150 dpi when printing at 5% coverage on A4 sized paper.
The Magenta ink cartridge yield is up to 300 pages @ 600 x 150 dpi when printing at 5% coverage on A4 sized paper.
The Cyan ink cartridge yield is up to 300 pages @ 600 x 150 dpi when printing at 5% coverage on A4 sized paper.
The Black ink cartridge yield is up to 350 pages @ 600 x 150 dpi when printing at 5% coverage on A4 sized paper.

so it appears that what you are experiencing is not normal and you may have a leaking printer.

There is one thing you can check though, everytime you print, make sure that you are not printing at the highest quality option selectable as this almost certainly will fire out more ink than regular printing... choose a middle quality option or even draft option if you will be printing regular text.

You need all colours to print even though you are are using black only. Actually unless your particular model has a dedicated black setting all colours are used for black printing.